Here I will post some short pieces on Sarala Mahabharata. Sarala Das is known as the "aadikavi" (the first poet) of Oriya Literature. He lived and wrote in the 15th Century. Mahabharat is his magnum opus. The episodes in Sarala's Mahabharat are significantly different from those in Vyasa's (Sanskrit) Mahabharat.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

KRISHNA AND THE WORLD HE CHOSE TO LIVE IN

In this post I am not answering
any questions about Krishna, although there are questions which I have to
answer some day, but am trying to look at him from a certain perspective. He arrived in
the world as its protector, but I have sometimes wondered, whereas his being the
protector is fine, at the same time, wasn’t the avatara a huge problem for the
world he came to protect?

Many questions have been asked
about him: why did he do this, why did he do that, and being omnipotent,
couldn’t have done something else in a given situation, etc. Those who have
written on Krishna in Sarala Mahabharata
have focussed on the personality and the doings of Krishna: what all he did, why
did he do what he did, what kind of a human he was, why did he conduct himself
in a disgraceful manner in certain situations, even who did Sarala have in mind
when he conceptualized his Krishna, and the like. This is fine and is quite expected
too. Krishna attracts, as his name suggests, so it is no surprise that the Krishna-discourse gets focused on him exclusively. But isn’t it possible that there might be other aspects to the absolutely absorbing
narrative concerning the avatara? Let’s shift the focus from Krishna to the world he came
to save and ask the question: how did the world he came to save, take him?

Think of some earlier avataras of
Vishnu: Matsya (Fish), Kurma (Tortoise), Varaha (Boar) and Nrusingha
(Man-Lion). They manifested in the world, readily performed their avataric task
and returned immediately to their Source. As for Vamana, after he sent king
Bali to patala (the name of a loka, a
habitat), he disappeared. Parashurama left the sacred precincts of the ashram and
his activities as an ashramite and entered the world outside with a weapon to
rid it of the wicked. Over a period of time he did that and when he decided
that his task was over, he returned to the ashram. Thereafter he stepped out of
it only rarely. During the time he was outside of his ashram, his interaction
with the world was largely limited to identifying the wicked and killing them.
Rama lived in the world, but primarily as a ruler. Being Maryada Purushottama, the very embodiment of dignity and decorum in
all spheres of life, he observed maryada
(decorum) in all his dealings and the maryada of the king often meant distancing himself from the common people. Neither Parshurama nor Rama had knowledge
of his self in that neither was aware of his avatarahood.

Krishna was different. In bhakta (devotee) Sarala’s narrative, he
was the embodiment of pure energy, pure knowledge – he knew the past, the
present and the future. And he had the knowledge of self – that he was the
avatara of Narayana. Such a one lived among ordinary mortals, like ordinary
mortals and lived intensely. Like everyone, he enjoyed the pleasures of the
body and was afraid of death (or at least seemed to be; in his case what was
real and what was pretension, a reader of Sarala
Mahabharata would be never sure. Who could understand his lila.). He quarreled with people, used offensive
language, humiliated people, cheated them, manipulated things and people and demanded
privileges he was not entitled to. In his dealings he showed unmistakable
partiality. Everyone knew he was the incarnation of Narayana Himself. Duryodhana
– it must be emphasized - called the Kurukshetra War dharma yuddha (war of Dharma) because of Narayana’s presence in the
war field. He would be the witness.

He betrayed the trust of Yudhisthira,
who had sent him as his emissary to the court of Duryodhana, by ensuring that
war took place, rather than peace prevailed. Bhishma advised Duryodhana not to
let Krishna go empty-handed, and give two villages to the Pandavas, if not
five, and at one stage Duryodhana was indeed inclined to do so but Sakuni told
him that Krishna should be given nothing because he would ask for the
impossible. When Krishna named the villages he wanted, everyone knew that they
simply could not be given. By asking for those specific five villages, he
ensured that there would be no alternative to war.

His clear partiality towards the
Pandavas and hostility against the Kauravas baffled the latter – how could Narayana
be partial? He baffled the Pandavas as well by asking them to do things
absolutely unethical. In the battlefield he asked a reluctant Yudhisthira to
tell a lie to his guru which, Yudhisthira knew, would lead to his killing and
he asked a reluctant Arjuna to kill Karna who was unarmed at that point of
time. By neutralizing Bhishma’s arrow with his sudarshanacakra (the
name of his ayudha or weapon),
unknown to anyone, man or god, he saved Arjuna’s life but by doing
so, he betrayed his word to his elder brother, Balarama. He had promised to him
that he would not participate in that war between brothers, which Balarama had
considered unacceptable and unethical. He betrayed dharma when he told his
brother that Bhishma was a liar and was levelling a baseless charge against him
by claiming that he had saved Arjuna’s life. Incidentally, this episode is
Sarala’s creation.

Recall what Duryodhana had said. He
must have felt betrayed when in the dharma
yuddha, the witness, in whose witness-hood he had such absolute trust, had participated
in the War.

After the War, in order to save
Yudhisthira from Gandhari’s yogic fire, Krishna had her only remaining son, Durdasa,
burnt to ashes by that fire. The poor mother got to know who she had destroyed
only after she had destroyed him. And Durdasa had left the Kaurava army and
joined the Pandavas responding to Yudhisthira’s call in the battlefield to join
him. The embodiment of dharma had promised protection to whosoever came over to
his side. Durdasa was the only one who had came. While each of Krishna’s deeds as
mentioned above was morally utterly reprehensible, the most reprehensible was
the killing of Durdasa. Yudhisthira was stunned. Although Sarala does not say
in so many words, he must have found Krishna’s explanation incomprehensible
that there must be no residue of the enemy. Durdasa had done absolutely nothing
to give the impression that he was a potential enemy of the Pandavas. His was a totally unfair, meaningless death.
The proposition that as a general principle, in order for dharma to emerge
victorious, some adharmic or
contextually less adharmic(violating dharma) means may have to be adopted,
could lead to chaos. How low, how mean could an acceptable means be? In any
case, such a proposition would sound pathetically hollow in front of the ashes
of Durdasa.

And in front of the dead and the
dying bodies of the countless fighters on the battlefield too. Dead bodies
demand answer for their fate. Gandhari asked Krishna their question too when
she asked him why he caused such massive destruction when it was in his powers
to stop it. Krishna gave her the most unconvincing of answers. He said he did
it to take revenge on the Kauravas who had humiliated him in the court when he came
there as emissary. This has to be false. I cannot think it to be otherwise. He couldn’t
have meant it. In Sarala Mahabharata
he is portrayed as not just the most exalted among the exalted, the mightiest
of the mighty, the most knowledgeable among the knowledgeable, be they humans,
asuras or gods, but also as the meanest of the mean and the lowest of the low. Still
he could not have stooped so low as to cause such a devastating war merely to avenge a personal insult. So Sarala
makes him say other things by way of explanation to others; Gandhari was not
the only one who had asked him that question. Elsewhere he said that he could
not have allowed dharma to perish. His sister Subhadra thought that he avenged
the killing of his dear nephew Abhimanyu by getting the Kauravas destroyed.
Which one was the truth or all these together constituted the truth one would
never know. But one can consider whether any of these would constitute an
adequate answer. The answer is an emphatic no. Is it possible that the cosmic
objective that he came to achieve, he simply could not articulate to man in a
way intelligible to him, whose knowledge is limited to the present alone? Suppose
he had told, whoever asked him about the logic of the comprehensive destruction
in the War, that he was Death Incarnate and had arrived to kill, would it have
made any sense to Gandhari or anyone else, except perhaps the sage Vyasa or the sage
Agsti? Even about them one can never be sure. True, they all showered praise on
Krishna, but never explained his ways to those who did not have their yogic
insight. In Sarala’s narrative, Krishna is as mysterious as his words.

And he who knew the past, the
present and the future mistook an old woman for his beloved Radha, for whom he
was waiting with intense longing. He made wild love to the old woman, Radha’s
emissary. What message about right and wrong would the world extract from this
act of the avatara?

In the world he chose to take
birth in, and in which everyone knew he was an incarnation of Narayana Himself,
Krishna was loved and unloved, obeyed and disobeyed, revered and despised, worshiped
and cursed. He seemed to dismiss the moral systems that people in his times lived by and
he flouted many norms by his conduct, but it is unclear what he recommended in
their place. Humans must necessarily use their ethical framework and their
knowledge system to make sense of things, including the doings of Narayana. He
is difficult to understand for the readers of Sarala’s narrative today, as he
must have been to the audience of his time and also to the world thousands of
years ago about which the great poet wrote. Krishna, the purna avatara (complete manifestation),
as he is called, would remain for ever a profound and a disturbing enigma for mankind. And enigmas, as we know, are always problematic for the humans because they can live comfortably only
in a universe that they can make sense of.

2 comments:

"Neither Parshurama nor Rama had knowledge of his self in that neither was aware of his avatarahood."

Lord Ram definitely had knowledge of His avatar hood. There are several instances of this in His lifetime. When Lord Parashuram confronts Him in the swayamvar hall, He revealed Himself which Parashuram understood that Ram is the 7th mahavatara of Vishnu.Another instance was in liberating Ahalya from the curse of Sage Gautama. When He touched Ahalya in stone form and restored her. And yet another instance in leaving the human form and returning to His abode Vaikuntha.It is said in the Ramayana that Lord Ram always knew of His destiny and went on to live it.

This link can be referred:http://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/8164/did-rama-as-a-human-know-that-he-is-god?lq=1

Thank you so very much! I will read the material you have referred to. My immediate response is that Krishna is said to be purna avatara (there is no controversy about it, to the best of my knowledge). I was trying to explicate this idea, but as you suggest, I will have to think more about it.